How JustGiving CIO Richard Atkinson uses cloud, data and machine learning to offer fundraisers 'a personal experience'

'If One Direction or Stephen Fry tweet something, we can have 10,000 visitors in ten seconds, so you need to scale quickly,' he tells Computing

If you or a friend have attempted to raise money for a good cause, it's likely that you're aware of JustGiving, the online social platform that helps people donate money to more than 20,000 charities.

What you might not realise, however, is how big an impact JustGiving has had, especially given its relatively small size, as CIO Richard Atkinson explains.

"The whole company employs 170 people and the tech team is just over half of that," he tells Computing, describing JustGiving as "the world's largest fundraising platform" and "bigger than Kickstarter".

Atkinson leads a team of 90 people responsible for developing and running JustGiving's ever-growing infrastructure, which needs to be able to cope with peaks in demand whenever there's a big charity drive. That's why JustGiving is migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to take advantage of its scalable infrastructure.

"We have lots of software-as-a-service around the organisation and we use things like Salesforce and we have platform-as-a-service around the organisation in things like Azure," Atkinson says.

"But when it comes to infrastructure-as-a-service, there are not very many players and AWS is by far the leader in that space," he adds.

Atkinson says AWS's scalability greatly benefits a relatively small organisation like JustGiving, allowing it to react to jumps in demand.

"You can start small then scale it up. It's not like enterprise package selection where if you choose Oracle, it's a decision you're living with for five years. You can start small then grow," he says, adding that support has been "fantastic".

"When we've needed to pick up the phone and understand aspects of tech we haven't used before, we've got a quick response from them. I feel as if I'm a very privileged customer," he says.

Atkinson says JustGiving needs to cope with spikes in traffic that are not only big, but also relatively sudden.

"People talk about scale, but in our case it's the speed to scale that matters. My peers in retail all talk about Black Friday bringing 10 times normal traffic, but for us, a busy day is 100 times normal," he says.

"If One Direction or Stephen Fry Tweet something, we can have 10,000 visitors in 10 seconds, so you need to scale but you need to scale quickly, it's about the gradient of the slope."

Everything on the up

As well as spikes in demand JustGiving's infrastructure needs to keep up with rapidly increasing volumes of traffic.

"The traffic volumes have gone up massively. Year on year we're up 40 per cent," Atkinson says.

That increase in traffic has also led to a vast rise in the amount of data JustGiving now finds itself collecting and using.

"Three years ago, when our only real source of data was Microsoft SQL server, you made decisions based on hundreds or thousands of data points," says Atkinson.

"Now we're making decisions based on individual taps and mouse clicks; we have 1.8 billion of those a year and you're attempting to find the 10 that matter to this specific user journey and making a decision on it on half a second."

Atkinson tells Computing that fundraising is "a very different world to even just 18 months ago". No longer is it just about "putting on some trainers and running a marathon in the spring". People are raising money in many different ways for many different causes throughout the year.

Atkinson admits that JustGiving "didn't see any of that coming" but has now adapted its strategy to cope with demand.

"Those fundraising efforts are really social, so JustGiving is turning itself into a social giving phenomenon," he explains, describing how, like Facebook, the organisation now "analyses behaviour and creates algorithms in order to provide the best user experience possible".

"When you visit JustGiving now, we'll show things your friends are doing which we think are of interest to you," Atkinson says. "You have a personalised homepage which is personal to you, no other user will get the same experience."

Home brewed AI

One way in which JustGiving is striving to improve its offering is through the use of machine learning.

"In the UK there are thousands of charities, so how do you actually make sense of all that to someone who is just trying to discover new things to care about?" Atkinson asks. "Rather than have human curation of which charities fit in which category, we'd like the machine to do that work."

To this end, JustGiving has created "software agents to explore the public domain and look at what's being written in natural language about charities".

"We're deconstructing what charities do into a much finer picture and then trying to rebuild it into the most impactful statement we can think of," he says. "It's a recent piece of work, so you won't see this in our products yet but we can see it as being a useful thing for people to find causes they care about outside of their network."

JustGiving's first steps into using artificial intelligence came before Amazon's own Machine Learning service was announced, but Atkinson tells Computing he's keen to see what it offers.

"We started in advance of that with a little bit of home-brew, but that only takes you so far," he says. "There's extra value-add in Amazon Machine Learning."

Another area where JustGiving is keen to push forward is mobile, as smartphones, tablets and wearables become ever more embedded into people's lives.

"We've got a lot of mobile app work happening," Atkinson says.

"Causes, fundraisers and donors [need to trust] that the money will go where they think it's going to go. That level of trust and personalisation is very well suited to the in-the-pocket smartphone experience. The app is very exciting, with all sorts of potential in terms of metadata surrounding geolocation and beacons."

Beacon technology, Atkinson says, potentially offers great value to JustGiving and its users.

"Historically, JustGiving has been synonymous with fundraisers having fundraising pages. But at the end of the day, it's a person supporting a good cause and they want to tell the world about it. It doesn't have to be a page, it can be a beacon transmitting something and it's through the mobile app which connections are made and people respond to the requests to support," he says.

Coders and leaders

JustGiving faces stiff competition for skilled staff, Atkinson tells Computing.

"One of my biggest challenges is the recruitment and retention of high-performing teams, especially in the areas of mobile app development and data science."

The growth of digital and financial firms in London has led to an "arms race" in hiring and retaining staff, he says.

"In London you have all the conditions to make finance technology really strong, so there's a lot of demand for the skills that we're looking for and that we have. Some days it feels like an arms race, you've got to keep a cool head and try and make sure the sum of the parts delivers," he says.

"The hard skills are barely the tip of the iceberg," Atkinson adds, with JustGiving looking for potential employees with leadership and collaboration skills, something that is built into the interview process.

"We ask candidates to do small group activities with two of our own developers. We're not looking for perfect code on a whiteboard, we're looking at group dynamic, the spirit of inquiry," he says.

"For an internet business to scale you need individuals and small teams to be autonomous; you can't have everything coming back to the centre for big decisions and strategic direction every five minutes," Atkinson explains.